Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Sandra Day O'Connor. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26, 1930) is a retired attorney and politician who served as the first woman associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was the first woman nominated and confirmed. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, she was considered the swing vote for the Rehnquist Court and the beginning of the Roberts Court.
Prior to O'Connor's tenure on the Court, she was a judge and an elected official in Arizona, serving as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate. Upon her nomination to the Court, O'Connor was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. On July 1, 2005, she announced her intention to retire effective upon the confirmation of a successor. Samuel Alito was nominated to take her seat in October 2005 and joined the Court on January 31, 2006.
She most frequently sided with the Court's conservative bloc. She often wrote concurring opinions that limited the reach of the majority holding. Her majority opinions in landmark cases include Grutter v. Bollinger and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. She also wrote in part the per curiam majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, and was one of three co-authors of the lead opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
During her time on the court, some publications ranked O'Connor among the most powerful women in the world. On August 12, 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
The really expert riders of horses let the horse know immediately who is in control, but then guide the horse with loose reins and seldom use the spurs.
If you take a position under the Constitution that is against the majority view, you have to explain it well enough that maybe you can persuade some of that majority to agree with you.
The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperative and her place in society.
A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens.
The proper role of the judiciary is one of interpreting and applying the law, not making it.
Suppose you had a cross burning in a play or a movie... Would that be intimidating?
Unfortunately civility is hard to codify or legislate, but you know it when you see it. It's possible to disagree without being disagreeable.
And I went off to Stanford, I was pretty young and pretty naive. And I had a professor I really loved, who was himself a lawyer.
We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
It was better for me when I was joined at the court by a second woman. When I was there alone, there was too much media focus on the one woman, and the minute we got another woman, that changed.
If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.
The prima facie evidence provision in this case ignores all of the contextual factors that are necessary to decide whether a particular cross burning is intended to intimidate. The First Amendment does not permit such a shortcut.
What the framers of the Constitution tried to achieve when they wrote that Constitution back in the 1700s was an independent federal judiciary. They wanted federal judges to be appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, and to serve for good behavior.
I sort of thought the framers of the Constitution were talking about the rights of individuals, not corporate entities.
For students, understanding the separate and unique functions of each branch of government can help them understand how different kinds of government officials can help solve different kinds of problems.
Each justice hires their own clerks, and applications are made individually to the justices. It isn't a group decision.
Half the states have stopped making civics and government a requirement for high school. Half.
I finally gave up my little law practice and stayed home for about three years. You have to do what you can to keep the family going. But I wanted to get back to work. So I got another babysitter and went to work as an Assistant Attorney General.
A fundamental premise of American democratic theory is that government exists to serve the people. ... Public records are one portal through which the people observe their government, ensuring its accountability, integrity, and equity while minimizing sovereign mischief and malfeasance.
It's hard to have little children and a job and career at the same time. There is no time left for you as a woman.
I do not believe it is the function of the judiciary to step in and change the law because the times have changed. I do well understand the difference between legislating and judging. As a judge, it is not my function to develop public policy.
The unhappy persistence of both the practice and the lingering effects of racial discrimination ...is an unfortunate reality...and the government is not disqualified from acting in response to it.
I don't know how a judge can concentrate on being fair and impartial when he or she is faced with possible jail time for making a decision that others deem incorrect.
I've always said that at the end of the day, on a legal issue, I think a wise old woman and a wise old man are going to reach the same conclusion.
The whole idea of a public education was to train young people about how our system of government works, so they could be good citizens and be part of it. We're not doing that today.
We don't accomplish anything in this world alone.
Longer Version:
We don't accomplish anything in this world alone... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.
Court is an institution that depends on making tough decisions in close cases for reasons that it explains well and that, in the past at least, have proven satisfactory to the public.
I think we may be seeing the beginnings of a resurgence of civic-mindedness in this country. Hopefully the younger generations, which came out in record numbers during the last presidential election, will pass their enthusiasm on to their children.
Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?
We have a complex system of government. You have to teach it to every generation.
It is true that as you have children, there are a good many months when you don't want to be working full-time. I agree that that's an issue.
The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried.
Each of us brings to our job, whatever it is, our lifetime of experience and our values.
Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances.
The power I exert on the court depends on the power of my arguments, not on my gender.
Yes, I will bring the understanding of a woman to the Court, but I doubt that alone will affect my decisions.
I'm a judge. It seemed to me that it was critical to try to take action to stem the criticism and help people understand that in the constitutional framework, it's terribly important not to have a system of retaliation against decisions people don't like.
It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution.
Most high courts in other nations do not have discretion, such as we enjoy, in selecting the cases that the high court reviews. Our court is virtually alone in the amount of discretion it has.
My sense is that jurists from other nations around the world understand that our court occupies a very special place in the American system, and that the court is rather well regarded in comparison, perhaps, to their own.
The abortion cases produced an enormous amount of mail to my chambers, vastly more than to the other chambers, I am sure. I sometimes thought there wasn't a woman in the United States who didn't write me a letter on one side or the other of that issue.
Occasionally we have to interpret an international treaty -- one, perhaps, affecting airlines and liability for injury to passengers or damage to goods. Then, of course, we have to look to the precedents of other member nations in resolving issues.
Historically courts in this country have been insulated. We do not look beyond our borders for precedents.
I wanted to be a cattle rancher when I was young, because it was what I knew and I loved it.
It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.
Apparently a great many people have forgotten that the framers of our Constitution went to such great effort to create an independent judicial branch that would not be subject to retaliation by either the executive branch or the legislative branch because of some decision made by those judges.
Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.
The more education a woman has, the wider the gap between men's and women's earnings for the same work.
Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.
Society as a whole benefits immeasurably from a climate in which all persons, regardless of race or gender, may have the opportunity to earn respect, responsibility, advancement and remuneration based on ability.
Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don't know how much history young women today know about those battles.
Commitment to the rule of law provides a basic assurance that people can know what to expect whether what they do is popular or unpopular at the time.
The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy.
Longer Version:
The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy. The problem comes when healthy criticism is replaced with more destructive intimidation and sanctions.
We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.
In terms of having the American people look at the court and think of it as being fair and appropriate for our nation, it helps to have women, plural, on the court.
I care very much about women and their progress. I didn't go march in the streets, but when I was in the Arizona Legislature, one of the things that I did was to examine every single statute in the state of Arizona to pick out the ones that discriminated against women and get them changed.
Parents should continue to become more involved with their communities, and more involved in their children's education.
The framers of the Constitution were so clear in the federalist papers and elsewhere that they felt an independent judiciary was critical to the success of the nation.
If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is.
What was a problem was the excessive amount of media attention to the appointment of the first woman and everything she did. Everywhere that Sandra went, the press was sure to go. And that got tiresome; it was stressful.